Monday, April 3 @ 7:00 PMVERONIKA VOSSDirected by Rainer Werner Fassbinder • 1982In German with English subtitlesRainer Werner Fassbinder’s most unambiguously beautiful film was also the last one he lived to see released. Months after Veronika Voss premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it would win the Golden Bear, Fassbinder would be dead of a drug overdose and his penultimate film would take on autobiographical echoes. Veronika Voss draws from the life and mysterious death of German actress Sybille Schmitz, best known abroad for her work in Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr but notorious in her home country for remaining active in the German film industry throughout the Third Reich. Fassbinder tracks the final days of his titular character (played with otherworldly abandon by the phenomenal German TV actress Rosel Zech), a has-been movie star with a paralyzing morphine addiction, as she is besieged by parasitic medical professionals, carries on an affair with a local sports reporter, and attempts to mount a comeback in the German film industry of the 1950s. Recalling the heyday of American film noir, as well as the horror-tinged melodramas Sunset Boulevard and The Seventh Victim, with the addition of more than a smidge of pitch-black humor and a quietly droning soundtrack of country music hits, Veronika Voss is an icy, monochrome masterpiece, in love with classic cinema and at odds with the industry behind it. (CW)
104 min • Tango Film • 35mm from Janus FilmsShort: TBA

Monday, March 13 @ 7:00 PMBABE: PIG IN THE CITYDirected by George Miller • 1998
Plot takes a backseat in George Miller’s disorderly and psychedelic sequel, which has more in common with films like Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and The Wizard of Oz than it does with its heartwarming predecessor. When circumstances force our little pink hero to leave his idyllic home for the city, he finds himself in a twisted Frankenstein of a place, a mix of Baz Luhrmann’s Paris and all the cities you’ve ever known. Babe is quickly severed from his companion Mrs. Hoggett (Magda Szubanski) and left to discover the city’s untold wonders (and horrors) alone. Bizarre characters abound in this bestial Mad Max: a pregnant chimp in a dress, a paraplegic Jack Russell Terrier (Adam Goldberg), a poodle the color of cotton candy, and a ghastly clown (played by Mickey Rooney, of course). It’s a film that delighted critics (it was Gene Siskel’s best film pick of 1998), horrified parents, and developed a deserved cult following since its release. One website that rates media for kids produced such choice parental reviews as “It’s dark, depressing, scary, sad…How ANYONE (let alone Roger Ebert) could say this is BETTER than the first, I will never know.” I think Bob the chimpanzee (voiced by the great Steven Wright) would respond, “It’s all illusory – it’s ill, and it’s for losers.” (RL)
97 min • Universal Pictures • 35mm from UniversalPreceded by: “The Dancing Pig” (“Le cochon danseur”) (Pathé Frères, 1907) – 16mm – 4 min

Wednesday, March 8 @ 7:30 PMTHE YOUNGER GENERATIONDirected by Frank Capra • 1929
Adapted from a play by Humoresque author Fannie Hurst, The Younger Generation is Columbia Pictures’s answer to The Jazz Singer, an altogether heartbreaking portrait of intergenerational conflict in New York’s Jewish community. Julius Goldfish (Jean Hersholt, namesake for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences’s Humanitarian Award) is a modest man who lives on Delancey Street and earns his living by hawking kitchenwares from a pushcart. His son Morris (Ricardo Cortez) has his eyes set on tonier things; after demonstrating marketing acumen at an early age by turning a tragic tenement fire into a fire sale, Morris grows his father’s business until it becomes a respectable Fifth Avenue antique dealership. Faced with pressure to assimilate into Park Avenue society, our striver changes his name to the decidedly goyish Maurice Fish and proceeds to push away his family, particularly his sister (Lina Basquette) and her song-plugger boyfriend (Rex Lease). Originally shot as a silent picture, four talking sequences were added prior to release, if only to demonstrate the proper pronunciation of “Oy gevalt” to inhabitants of America’s Heartland. (KW)
84 min • Columbia Pictures • 35mm from Sony Pictures RepertoryPreceded by: “The Spider and the Fly” (1938) – 16mm – 12 min

Introduced by Nancy McVittie, Instructor in the College of Arts and Sciences at NEIU, and co-author of Fade to Gray: Aging in American Cinema